I also agree that simple, summative levelling is not what is required – and the idea is very much that staff will be assessing as they go, this won’t be based on one assessed piece of work – but will be linked to units of work (so we can say that ‘Little Johnny’ did well during the early part of the year, but struggled after Easter).

Using the DB as devised above, it would be possible to see when tasks were met, and by a relatively simple expansion, to track who has provided that assessment – or using a tiny bit of leg work even without that expansion.

As for MAPS, I have used it to submit iMedia coursework and have to say I was singularly unimpressed with its usability and intuitiveness.

If you ‘do’ APP after a single unit of work you may not have enough evidence to make a rounded judgement – the aim is to make rounded, wholistic judgements, not fragmented ones.

An APP tracker system might be an electroning record keeping system but should not actually calculate levels – this is still down to ‘judgement’. I think you’d also need to keep dates of when the various assessments were made and when the overall ‘level’ was re-evaluated so that you can track progress over time.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could link the assessment made to pupil work and some teacher comment? – it seems to me that this is beyond a basic Access database. TAG are working on this through their MAPS project which seems well though through and integrates with Moodle I think.

There may well be a case for a simple recording system but I would try to limit the scope of such a project so that you don’t try to do everything. I have seen an Access database for just this which I will try to dig out and upload for you.

It would make a nice little module in it’s own right though – if I had the time I would offer to write it for you. It would just need to present a screen for each student enrolled in course with various tick boxes and then do some calculations on them…

You may be able to find a freelance coder to write it for you…

The other alternative would be to do them as a collection of offline activities, one for each level and get staff to enter the grade as a 0-3 depending on how many statements achieved for each level, then do a calculated grade to workout the sublevel depending on what criteria you choose. Not idea as you will not be able too see which statments you said they could do… Or one step further and have an assigngment for each statment taking a 0 or 1, then a calculated grade… This gives you a full picture but is a little slower to enter. I would suggest you use ‘quickgrade’ in the gradebook and just fill in the 0,1’s then again use the calculated field to generate the final level…

At the end of a unit of work, teachers should have a series of criteria (e.g. planning an ICT solution, evaluating the effectiveness of the solution, etc. – although not all 9 will be relevant for every unit) and then award a level for that criteria (e.g. 4). As there are 9 criteria, this should build up over time into a picture of increasing ability and understanding and we should be able to track when that criteria was met.

If a student has met all criteria to L4 and 5 or 6 to L5 then they would be graded as 5c (working towards L5). On getting all L5 they would be 5b (secure L5) and having moved on to 2 or 3 L6 they would be 5a (beyond L5).

Anyway let me check, you want techers to select the statements from this list for each student (per unit)? How do you want this infor fed back? Levels/sublevels returned to students, students can see which statements were ticked etc?

Just trying to get a clear picture of what you are after…

Andy:The idea is that the staff grade the students. While self assessment is a very useful tool, I’m really after a recording and reporting tool right now that we teachers use to assess the pupils’ progress While we could do it as a quiz, it doesn’t really have the recording capabilities in terms of when that criteria was met (which unit), etc.

If so the obvious solution is to build it as a quiz in moodle, then match the questions with scores – mayble level 3 gets 1 point for each statement, level 4 gets 10, level 5 gets 100, level 6 gets 1000 etc…

Then determin their level by looking at the total score, and return the level based upon how far through each interval they are…

If this sounds like the kind of thing you are interested I’ll can have a go at putting something like this together for you to look at…

On the plus side, our sets don’t move around and if we label them by intake year (e.g. 06A1 instead of 9A1) then it saves re-jigging things. Pfeh. Think I would rather be marking, for a change